Jeffrey Wells

I saw Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla last night, and it has a certain depressive, despairing, slow-paced, fade-to-black quality that some viewers might find…well, respectable. I understand why certain critics have approved. It’s austere. And anti-male, of course. Coppola has been drawing water from this well over and over (i.e., a beautiful, young, sensitive princess is trapped in an authoritarian, male-dominated world) — here she’s added a #MeToo “expose the bastards!” ingredient.

I didn’t hate it but Priscilla sure moves like a turtle, and the cinematography is too dimly lighted and funereal even. (That or the foot-lambert levels are way below SMPTE standards at the Westport AMC plex where I saw it.) And some of the whispered, all-but-inaudible dialogue is all but impossible. Subtitles!

All I know is that the longer the film went on, the more my pulse dropped.

As I was exiting the theatre I overheard a youngish, palefaced brunette tell her mom (same characteristics) that she “loved it.” As she stood in the lobby I told her I had also just seen Priscilla, and that I was wondering (without tipping my own hand) what in particular she had loved. “It’s just that it tells the story from her viewpoint!” she exclaimed. “The others (Elvis films, I assumed she meant) have all told it from his.”

You’re right, I said — it certainly has Priscilla’s back.

If you’ve read “Elvis and Me“, Priscilla Presley‘s 1987 tell-all, or are familiar with the main story points (Elvis’s refusal to have intercourse before marriage, his pattern of infidelity including affairs with Ann-Margret, Nancy Sinatra and many others, the drug use, his dictatorial nature and random violence, Priscilla’s affair with a martial-arts instructor named Mike Stone, Elvis’s raping Priscilla when he learned of the affair), it’s important to understand that Coppola’s film sidesteps or underplays this material and in some cases ignores it entirely. She was determined not to make a “this happened and then that happened” biopic. She wanted to suggest and hint but not be especially blunt about anything.

The result, frankly, is boredom, albeit a respectable form of it — the kind that many critics have approved of.

Posted on 4.7.17:

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Cody Jarret to Hezbollah: “Come and get me, ya dirty…”

Every so often I get really sick of looking at all these lying, smiling, happy–as–a–clam faces on social media…too many damn blissful photos in too many flush locations, I’m tellin’ ya…well-heeled older folks using Hawaii and Paris and Sicily and Turks and Caicos or some midtown Manhattan restaurant as backdrop statements or general affirmations of comfort and contentment…happy and beaming and seemingly overjoyed…time of our lives!

These are presentations, of course, and naturally they’re not truthful. Advertisements For Ourselves. We all understand this, of course, but this doesn’t stop the infinite ecstasy people from posting these ads 24/7. Every Instagram day is a deluge of feigned fucking delight.

Do I blame people for trying to flood my feed with relentless happyface messaging? I guess not but on the other hand and to be perfectly honest I’m feeling more and more resentful, ya wealthy, well-fed, nicely tanned and well-dressed pricks ya.

If I was hanging today in Turks and Caicos would I take the same kind of “hah!..look at how wonderful my life is!” selfies and post them all over? No, I wouldn’t — I would post handsome photos, sure, but of anyone or anything other than myself because I no longer look like the handsome glammy guy of yore** and I don’t particularly want to advertise this fact.

** Even though I look half-decent for a “seasoned” guy with my Prague touch-ups, relatively trim physique for a guy who sits and writes every damn day, CVS whitened teeth and dark Prague hair.

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I’m very sad and sorry about the death of Friends star Matthew Perry, 54. Drowned in his jacuzzi, they’re saying, but one way or another…it feels cruel to blurt it out but we all suspect that Perry’s decades of off-and-on drug abuse probably had something to do with this. Success, money, luck, good looks, and he couldn’t make it work. A tragic tale from any angle. Chandler, adieu.

No marriage, no kids, 54 years old.. Nobody just falls asleep in a jacuzzi and drowns,

…if Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (Columbia/Apple, 11.22) was still called Kitbag? I haven’t loved a movie title this much in a long time. Imagine those hundreds of thousands of Joe and Jane Popcorn types reacting in the usual ADD dumbshit way…”Kitbag…fuck is that?…let’s see something else.”

The Kitbag title was abandoned sometime in January ’22, or roughly 21 months ago.

Frank J. Lauta, the father of my ex-wife Maggie, passed a little more than a week ago. Maggie and our sons Jett and Dylan are attending a memorial service for Frank in Hamlin, New York — a suburb of Rochester. I’ve been watching a live–stream for the last hour or so. I’ve just posted the following on the church’s website:

“Frank was a good citizen, a kind soul and a compassionate human being. He was the father of my ex-wife, Maggie, and therefore ‘family’ for roughly four-plus years (‘87 through ‘92). We had sporadic contact for a few years. We all vacationed in the summer of ‘91 in Cape Cod when his grandsons (Jett and Dyian) were toddlers. I was honored to know him and his wife, Jeanne.

“I’m sorry that Frank never met his great-granddaughter, Sutton (daughter of Jett), but she’s part of him and he will always be part of her. Goodbye and farewell, Frank…you’re part of the infinite stream now.”

…when a brazen envelope-pusher has been heavily hyped in overlapping festival pressure-cooker environments like Venice and Telluride, and then Jeff Sneider comes along and goes “wait…whut?”

Allow me to clarify — Poor Things is Barbie meets a heterosexual Victorian British empire version of Fellini Satyricon.

Let no one say L.A. Times critic Justin Chang isn’t a man of character. For he’s panned Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, the almost universally praised, odd-couple prep school comedy with Paul Giamatti as a curmudgeonly ancient history professor, and newcomer Dominic Sessa as a bright malcontent student. Chang may be an outlier in this regard, but it takes balls to stand against the majority. I should know.

Chang slams The Holdovers for being insincere (“flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic”) but also, it seems, because of an incident of racial animosity between two minor characters — a snotty white kid named Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner) and a fragile Korean student named Ye-Joon Park (Jim Kaplan).

Early on Kountze belittles Park, you see, by calling him “Mr. Moto” — apparently a trigger in more ways than one.

Chang: “In reducing Ye-Joon to such an abused prop, is The Holdovers really any better [than Kountze]? Can anyone watch a scene this callous and then be honestly moved by [Giamatti’s] speech about the injustices of American racism, classism and white privilege?”

In short The Holdovers, which is mostly set in December 1970, is guilty of a 2023 woke crime. In Chang’s head, I should add.